Bloggers Taking On The State

JIDDAH, Saudi Arabia — When he was a college student in Washington state, Saudi Arabia’s most popular blogger, Fouad al-Farhan, donned a T-shirt emblazoned with “Animal Rights Equals Human Rights” and slept on the campus lawn during a hunger strike protesting the slaughter of foxes.

That type of freedom during six years in the United States gave Farhan a taste for expressing himself that he was unable to satisfy when he returned to Saudi Arabia in 2001.

“You can’t write whatever you want in the newspaper here; you can’t even lift up a poster in protest,” said Farhan, 31, a computer programmer who attended Eastern Washington University in Spokane. “On the blog, it’s a different world. It was the only way to express myself the way I wanted.”

Farhan is part of a growing wave of young Arabs who have turned to blogging to bypass the restrictions on free expression in a predominantly authoritarian, conservative and Muslim region. Blogging is so novel here that the equivalent term in Arabic, tadween, to chronicle, was coined only this year. But it has spread rapidly among the increasingly urban youth and in the process has loosened the limits of what’s open for discussion.

Activists have used their blogs to organize demonstrations and boycotts, and to criticize corruption and government policies. The less politically inclined have turned them into forums for heated debates on religion and a place to share personal stories and sexual fantasies.

And it appears that they are tapping into a well of resentment:

Farhan often uses humor to lessen the sting of his unusually daring rebukes.

On prominent display on his blog is a link to statements by government officials, one in 2002 and one in 2006, both promising an end to unemployment within five years. A ticker on his site counts down, “1,629 days left till unemployment is eradicated in Saudi Arabia.”

A little farther down is a poll.

“Do you trust the government?”

About 60 percent of the 280 respondents said they did not.

A small sample to be sure, but then the number of people with Internet access in Saudi Arabia remains small….for now. What Farhan’s blog, and others profiled in the article show though, is that there is a generation rising in the Middle East eager to join the modern world and throw of the shackles that have been imposed on them.

One blogger puts it this way:

“I want our society to move forward, and I want to be part of that change,” Omran said. “I don’t want to be 40 and still struggling with the issues we’re dealing with now.”